Voicemail transcription otherwise known as voicemail to text has come to the world’s most popular IP communications software package, Skype. SpinVox technology will be used to convert voicemails to text in the following languages to start: English, Spanish, French and German. More from TMCnet.
I just had a lunch with James Siminoff the Founder and CEO of SimulScribe this past Monday and we got to talking about the voicemail transcription market. James is pretty low key when it comes to estimates and it seems I am more enthusiastic about the potential in this market than even he is.
What we did agree to as a baseline is that the market for these services should be as big as the smartphone space. Deals like this one above with Skype can only expand the market for transcription services.
James tells me the pricing for his service is $0.25 a message with a $10 minimum per month. His comp-any is working on an unlimited plan as well. There is more but I have to keep it under wraps for now.
The future of voicemail to text services could be/should be much greater than the smartphone market for the following reason… SMS. What I mean is that although SMS is not the best way to read long voicemails, a single SMS message can give you a good idea what a voicemail is all about. I can’t imagine a subscriber who doesn’t their voicemails sent via SMS. It is just so addictive when you start to use it.
Since carriers get paid for SMS traffic and this traffic is slowly migrating to free e-mails on unlimited data plans… It makes sense for wireless carriers to start pushing any product that increases SMS usage. There is a massive amount of wireless carrier revenue to be made from voicemail transcription to SMS.
When you factor wireless carrier marketing into the equation you see the market for such services can be triple or quadruple the smartphone/Blackberry space in terms of number of subscribers.
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